Her Secret, His Child: A Little Secret by Tara Quinn (rosie project .txt) 📕

reason to hate her. This revelation was so much worse than anything she'd ever suffered at John's hands. Because Tom had destroyed her trust, but worse, her self-respect. Just nineteen years old, she was an old man's whore.

Tom came to her that evening, full of contriteness, but Jamie didn't even get the satisfaction of telling him he could never touch her again. He didn't want her forgiveness. He was there to end their association. Not only wasn't he trying to get in her pants, he wasn't going to be financing her education any longer. If he did, his wife was going to sue him for divorce.

For Jamie, the worst part was that Tom was only contrite for breaking off their relationship. He apparently felt no compunction about deceiving her in the first place, for making her the "other woman" without even giving her the opportunity to decide on that role for herself. And he wasn't the least bit sorry for choosing his wife over Jamie. Seemed to think that was a foregone conclusion. Jamie wasn't worth a messy divorce. Wasn't worth the public humiliation and censure divorce might have brought. When all was said and done, she wasn't worth anything at all.

He'd left her shaking and alone, with nowhere to turn, nowhere to live when her lease was up at the

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end of the month. By the time Tom called, after midnight that same night, she'd been so frightened, so desperate, she'd talked to him.

She'd cried with relief when he'd told her he still wanted to help her. Gradually she'd understood what he meant, but by then she was too needy not to listen. He'd told her he had friends, professional classy men, who'd be willing to pay her well for just a little of her time, men who traveled often, who usually came to town for only a day or two. Powerful men who took care of their own.

It was too late to be anything other than what she was, so when the powerful businessmen called her, Jamie accepted the money they offered. But the one constant that allowed her to do so was the affection each man, without fail, lavished on her. God help her, she was starved for affection, for approval, and being with men who were kind to her, who appreciated her, who wanted her, went a long way toward mending the emotional damage her stepfather had caused.

Her clients were all referrals from Tom. And if she received a phone call from one she didn't immediately like, she was too busy to see him. She played games with herself. She told herself that as long as she didn't enjoy the physical ministrations of the men she was with, as long as she never shared a climax with them, she wasn't selling anything that mattered. She had her rules. She always, always, insisted that the man she was with be sober and that he use protection. She abided nothing rough, nothing kinky, and never, ever consorted with more than one

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man at a time. She'd take a repeat client only if she wasn't currently seeing another.

And before she knew it, she was in her junior year at the university, an honor student, a favorite with all her teachers, popular with other students. And no one there knew that for a few hours a couple of evenings a week, she was a very expensive, high-class prostitute.

Wrapping her arms around herself on the cold living-room floor, Jamie stared at the dead embers in her fireplace and cried. She'd had one goal back then: to finish school, get a decent job and never have to be dependent on anyone for the rest of her life. The only thing she'd lived for was the day she could own her life, her body, for the first time since she was four years old.

And then she'd met Kyle Radcliff.

Shuddering, trapped, Jamie didn't know where to go from there. Kyle was a time bomb slowly ticking. If she didn't get rid of him, her life was going to explode right before her eyes.

But as she contemplated lying to the man, or better yet, running again, something frightening held her back. Her conscience. She'd worked so hard to become the respectable, honorable woman she'd always known she could be. The woman she really was. And now her respectable, honorable conscience wouldn't let her just take Ashley and vanish.

Because with Kyle Radcliff in town, with her discovery that he might, after all, be an honest decent man, she had one powerful reason to stay. Ashley.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Miss Karen's mad at me." Ashley moved the queen's boat across the ocean, 'cept the queen wasn't in the boat; the king was.

"No, she isn't, honey," Mommy said. "Why would you think she's mad at you?"

"When I sleeped there, she didn't talk to me."

"But she talked to you this afternoon when she came over to pick up Kayla."

Ashley pondered that for a minute. She dumped the king from the queen's ship and put the queen in. And then ran the ship through a big cloud that was really a big pile of bubbles. But that was okay because the ocean was really just in the bathtub with Ashley.

"Miss Karen's got a lot on her mind right now," Mommy said. She was the lighthouse, even though she was just a person sitting on the closed lid of the toilet and didn't have a light at all.

And Mommy always said that about people having things on their minds when she wanted Ashley to stop asking questions.

Somehow, Ashley knew she'd made Miss Karen sad with her and she didn't know how, but she didn't want Mommy sad with her, too, so she'd quit

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asking questions just like Mommy wanted. Just like she wasn't asking questions about her daddy, either.

They'd made Mommy really sad with her, those questions. Ashley thought she knew why, and she didn't want Mommy to tell her, so she didn't ask about her daddy anymore for that